The Hangman’s Replacement
Taona D. Chiveneko
Chiveneko Publishing Inc
(January 15, 2013)
2/5 Stars
The Hangman’s Replacement starts off extremely strong with an interesting story about how Abul has left his family and headed to the city to procure a job and thereby getting them not only a livable wage but health care as well. This character is fascinating and the story while certainly odd and somewhat amusing held my interest for the beginning of the book.
Then the book devolves into a series of stories with a series of characters both fleshed out and barely mentioned. It does this in the service of the overarching story about these fire lilies that have apparently acquired a taste for human flesh and what is to be done about them. This too would have been interesting had the story settled for this. In the interests of some kind of misguided characterization, characters that the reader barely has met go off on tangents about everything from adultery to organ harvesting. I was less than interested in the majority of these stories. And this type of top down storytelling with no real regard for a character driven story might have worked in the past but today it appears as what it can only be called,”a relic.”
I would like to say that I have hopes for further books in the series. But after reading this book, I have no interest in this topic or story at all anymore. This may have been a good book, if the author could have just created one character and told the entire story through them. Rather than trying to create what amounts to a short story collection with an overarching theme.
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